Serving almost six million riders a day and operating 24/7, the New York subway system is an icon of the city — and no small feat to run. So how did it get this bad?

Today, the city’s subway has the worst on-time performance of any major rapid transit system in the world. For the past few months, The Times has published a series of stories about the increasing delays and malfunctions in the system, and the three decades of political decisions that have allowed for them. Brian Rosenthal, an investigative reporter, discovered tight relationships between the Metropolitan Transportation Authority labor unions and the governor and examined how bond issuance fees were funneling money to the state government even as budgetary constraints prompted routine maintenance cuts. Emma Fitzsimmons, a transit reporter, dove deep into a signal system that dates to World War II and was never meant to handle 2018 traffic.

The Times’s Enterprise video team, where I am a producer, works on narrative-driven, in-depth video projects tied to the paper’s top news priorities. My colleague Alexandra Garcia and I reimagined reporting that appeared in the Metro section as the backbone of a creative explainer documentary that was published this week. We settled on a fast-paced, quirky editing style for the piece, which meant that every second on screen would count and need to be intentionally crafted. Producing and editing this 10-minute video has been my sole focus for the past 10 weeks.

“I’m obsessed with the subway and after five years in New York, still find it a miracle that I can get from one side of the city to the other just by stepping on what are essentially moving platforms underneath the city,” Alex noted. “But I’ve also been late to work too many times to not want to do a somewhat absurd look at what has gone wrong.”

Alex and I started by sifting through the hundreds of commuter responses The Times had received from a callout to our readers this summer. We spoke with a woman who missed her court hearing because she was caught in a subway delay, a father who hadn’t tucked his child into bed for weeks, and a hospice chaplain who was en route to care for a dying patient when she was sent on a series of rerouted trains. Subway delays, after all, are sometimes much more than an inconvenience. A delay can push you ten minutes behind schedule — or it can mean you’ve missed your only son’s bar mitzvah. We wanted to infuse the video with human experience: what it feels like to depend on a system that is in a state of emergency.

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The history and operations of the subway system are complex. We knew that we would need to cover topics (debt refinancing, deferred maintenance) that might normally send people clicking away, and that we’d have to get creative to hold people’s attention. Bond issuance fees were a particular challenge: They may sound (very) dull, but they’re to blame for millions of dollars that the state has drained from the M.T.A.’s budget. It was one of the most important discoveries in The Times’s investigation.

After trying out various approaches to illustrating the concept of bond issuance fees, we landed on an idea particularly appropriate to the subject matter: hiring a subway busker to write a piece of music about them. (Because everything is better in song!) We also worked with Aaron Byrd, our in-house graphics guru, to create visuals with a distinct, low-fi aesthetic. Aaron explains, “stylistically, we wanted to smash together as many styles as we could.” He calls it, “an insane mishmash of color, shape and motion.” And we tried to capture the feeling of disastrous subway rides to show how deferred maintenance has real-life repercussions with which New York commuters are probably all too familiar.

By interviewing Times experts — Brian, Emma and Jim Dwyer, who has been reporting on the subways for more than 30 years — we were able to pinpoint aspects of the story that could really be brought to life on video. Jim told us, for example, that some retired subway cars had been parked on the ocean floor, to be used as artificial reefs. Because of how the M.T.A. handled the refinancing of its debt in 2002, riders today are still paying for these subway cars that are now effectively homes for fish. When we found a great archival clip from an old New York Times TV collaboration with the Discovery Channel, of these huge cars being dumped into the ocean, we knew we’d hit the jackpot.

It was important that the video communicate and honor the horrors experienced by commuters. But we also wanted to leave the viewer with a sense of pride and appreciation for what the system has been — and, just maybe, can be again.

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A version of this article appears in print on February 2, 2018, on Page A2 of the New York edition with the headline: Getting the Train Moving (On Screen). Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe